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Successful ITSM demands perfect SAM

Whether you use ServiceNow, Cherwell, TOPdesk or any other IT Service Management solution, you invested in ITSM to drive real business value across your organization.

But service desks are large and complicated platforms, often hamstrung by poor or missing data. In fact, sources suggest that as many as 85% of CMDB implementations fail due to data problems.

Step forward Software Asset Management, or SAM.

Although not an obvious priority for an already-business IT Service Manager, SAM is increasingly a must-have if you want to roll-out and maintain an effective:

Product catalog

Service catalog

CMDB

Software request process

Why SAM is critical to ITSM

To create a Product Catalog or Service Catalog, you need to build the appropriate software and hardware models. And to do that you need to spend hundreds of hours manually identifying the software in use across the network from the available raw inventory data.

Or rather, you did.

Snow’s SAM can automate the task of creating software models, hardware models and counters, populating the Product Catalog in no time at all, saving your organization tens of thousands of dollars in expensive consultancy bills.

Suddenly your Service Desk is full of actionable data to support some of the most critical ITIL and service management processes.

Why service desks care about software licensing

While compliance is rarely the responsibility of the Service Desk, maintaining an optimized software licensing position is critical to ongoing smooth IT operations. Providing service desk staff with an accurate view of the current Effective Licensing Position (counters in Service Management speak) makes it easy to support important decisions about fulfilling software requests or initiating additional license procurement.

Supercharge your CMDB with SAM

The same processes of inventory cleansing and normalization that are critical to successful Software Asset Management are equally valuable to creating a comprehensive and accurate CMDB. And a reliable CMDB will enable your organization to successfully deliver a wide range of IT services that would otherwise be impossible.

SAM + ITSM = the best of both worlds

Let your Service Desk solution do what it does best – deliver IT services. But empower both the solution and your staff with the very best actionable SAM intelligence available.

The Snow SAM platform is used by 6,000 organizations worldwide to manage software usage and licenses across all vendors and platforms.